Norwegian is an environmentally-friendly language

As I was looking at the city of Ålesund from above for the first time in a beautiful summer day, I was obviously thinking about how the three R’s of the environment- reduce, reuse and recycle – are used even in language.

In Norwegian, words are reused to their maximum potential and recycled so that we reach a point where you can form a perfectly good complex sentence by only using two words, if you are repeating them often enough. Moreover, they are reduced to two, maximum three letter words, as it is in the question Er det det det er?

What’s ironic is that all this effort is put into forming a rather redundant question meaning: Is this what this is?

Either way, cool to know. And to practice saying it faster and faster.